Rewiring Neuroscience

by John Harris


PREVIEW OF THE BOOK

In the early 1990s, our long accepted (cc 1926) understanding of how a nerve encodes and conveys information was unexpectedly overturned by experiments on fast flying bats and insects. Around 1995, we began to realize we no longer knew what neurons actually do.

In the fourteen years since, many competing hypotheses have been advanced, suggesting various alternate neural encoding schemes. But the question of how a nerve communicates remains unanswered. It is a huge, gaping hole, at the most basic level, in our understanding of how the nervous system works.

This book is about what would happen if, as a thought experiment, we were to rewire the human nervous system using a multichannel neuron. It explores the impact of this hypothetical "smarter" neuron on vision, memory and the brain.

The theoretical payoff is enormous. Suddenly the brain, which operates on impulses moving at velocities barely better than highway speeds – becomes in theory a dazzlingly fast and competent thinking machine. Which is, of course, exactly what the brain is in real life.